Dona Nicanora's Hat Shop (22 page)

It was entirely expected that Rodriguez would follow in his father's footsteps. Nobody had ever questioned the path his life would take. But the young Rodriguez did not choose his friends wisely. By the age of sixteen, he had taken to spending his evenings in the bars frequented by the sailors who came and went through the port. His parents, unaware of their son's pastimes, were content with their delusion that he was reading legal statutes in the library. Instead, his studies were teaching him how to hold down impressive quantities of beer without falling over or throwing up, and he was beginning to be able to win beer-drinking competitions with a panache that impressed even the most hardened of sailors. It was during this time that he was introduced to the women who made their living in the little rooms at the backs of the bars. He felt more at ease in their presence than he had in the company of anyone for years. They listened to him, comforted him when he got maudlin, laughed when he cracked jokes, and asked nothing of him except a very reasonable payment, at a discounted student rate, for the pleasure of the comfort of their bodies at night.

His father, unknown to him, was working on a plan to secure his son's future, through marriage to the daughter of his influential and highly esteemed business partner. While Rodriguez was
discovering the meaning of pleasure, his father was ensuring that his future, life and liberty were all neatly sewn up in a deal that would handsomely benefit both parties. Rodriguez had an inkling that something was afoot when the daughter of the business partner started to appear frequently at the house for afternoon tea. A pale, quiet, thoughtful young woman, she would look anxiously at her parents for approval every time she dared to open her mouth. After her visits, Rodriguez would disappear from the house, increasingly for several days at a time, seeking solace in the company of real women.

It was during one of these absences that he managed to destroy his family's reputation overnight. His father had fought and won his mayoral campaign under the banner of:
Keep Manola pure: a town built on clean hearts and sound minds
. As part of the purity campaign, his father had devised a plan to shut down all the brothels in the port area, which he considered a scourge on the town's wholesome reputation, if not its income. A series of secret raids were planned with the police, to take place on a particular night, the police having taken advantage of the notice they had been given to warn their favourite madams to get the best girls out of town.

On the day of the planned raid, one of the police officers, hearing that the mayor's son was a frequent visitor to one of the targeted establishments on the list, sent word to the mayor to make sure Rodriguez was not on the premises that night. The mayor, outraged at the insinuation, went looking for his son among the law tomes in the library; but he was nowhere to be found. In growing fury, he decided to go to the brothel himself and remove Rodriguez before the raid took place. Unfortunately, the raid was brought forward two hours by the head of police, who was due to go on leave the following day and had a particularly early start planned.
The mayor, who had gone to the brothel in disguise, was rounded up with all the other punters, having been caught in a room with a naked woman in the middle of an altercation with a young man. The police assumed it was a row between two regulars who had got their timings confused. Even more unfortunate for the mayor, the punter in the room next door was a journalist from the leading newspaper that had opposed his electoral campaign. The paper ran the story the following day with the headline:
Hypocrisy governs Manola: Mayor caught with his trousers down.

The next week, Rodriguez was sent away from the family home, to tend to the affairs of his widowed great-aunt in a town at the end of the world, where he could do no more damage to the family name. Rodriguez had at first gone willingly, prepared to ingratiate himself with his wealthy relative with the aim of inheriting her fortune, having been led to believe that she was unlikely to last the year out. More than thirty years on she looked exactly the same, and gave no signs of being inclined to pass her fortune to anyone, least of all her great-nephew.

Doña Teresa had introduced the mayor to Gloria during his first year in Valle de la Virgen. Gloria was a very flirtatious and fulsome young woman, and he had instantly felt at ease with her. His aunt had introduced her as the daughter of the neighbouring estate owner, and Rodriguez swiftly calculated that, if he played his cards right, he could be heir to most of the land in the province by the time the year was out. What his great-aunt failed to tell him, until the day after the wedding, was that Gloria's father had played his own cards extremely badly. Having gambled his land away, he was desperately trying to marry off his daughters, who were becoming a drain on his dwindling resources and fragile nerves. What was more, Gloria was as good a match as any for the extravagant
behaviour of her husband. And yet, over the years, despite all the failings of their lives and marriage, the mayor and his wife had found a way of accommodating each other, which at times was reassuring and comforting to both, and which, in brief moments of clarity, they recognised as love.

It was the sobbing that did the trick. It was exactly what Gloria needed to hear. Suddenly the mayor heard the lock click. The bedroom door opened slowly and an eye peeped through the crack. With the swiftness of a cat bolting from a trap, Gloria's head then poked out.

‘Rodriguito, my dear,' she said softly. ‘Do you really mean what you say?'

‘Of course I do, my sweet,' he said, scrabbling to his knees. ‘You are the world to me. Let me in now, my love. We have gone on too long with this, don't you think?'

‘Say those beautiful things to me again,' Gloria said softly.

‘What beautiful things are those, my sweet?' the mayor asked, already having forgotten the poetic phrases that had come to his mind in desperation.

‘The thing about the peach,' said Gloria.

‘What thing about a peach is that?' the mayor said.

‘You remember,' Gloria said, ‘the thing about me being a tender little peach.'

‘Please, let me in, my tender little peach,' the mayor sang again, struggling to his feet. And for the first time since his arrival home, he was welcomed back into the bedroom. Before his wife had time to rearrange her hair, he lay down on the bed and fell into a deep
sleep, his snores drowning out her tender words. He was woken in the morning by Gloria shaking him violently.

‘Wake up, wake up, Lucia mustn't find you here,' she whispered, as if they were young lovers about to be caught in the middle of a clandestine tryst.

‘It's my bloody bedroom,' he said, the husband of the night before having vanished.

‘Let me deal with Lucia,' Gloria protested. ‘If she knows you've slept here, she'll think you've forced your way in and will start spreading all sorts of rumours. Let me tell her today that I have forgiven you.'

‘As long as she'll be gone from my house by tonight,' the mayor said. ‘We need some time to ourselves, my sweet, my little peach.'

‘I'll deal with her,' Gloria said, determined that this was the day when she would confront Lucia and put an end to her insinuations for ever. ‘I promise that by this evening she
will
be gone.' The mayor had then to face the indignity of climbing out of the bedroom window and creeping through the undergrowth and back into the sitting room, so that his sister-in-law would not know he had managed to have one good night's sleep in his own bed.

The mayor was so pleased with himself that he still knew how to win back his wife's favours after all these years, that he felt obliged to share some of his manly wisdom with Ramon, when he scuttled back into the office an hour later in an agitated state.

‘Ah, Ramon,' the mayor said. ‘How are things with you today?'

Ramon was so flabbergasted by the unusual nature of the
question that he was quite unable to answer it. Instead he busied himself tidying the mayor's desk and, in so doing, knocked the mounds of unread paperwork into a heap on the floor, burying the letter marked
Urgent
that he had placed there several weeks ago and had failed to tell the mayor about.

‘There now,' he said, having rearranged the documents. Forgetting what had brought him to the room in the first place, he made to leave as quickly as he could.

‘You're not a married man, are you, Ramon?' the mayor asked, stopping him in his tracks. ‘Very wise, very wise. It takes a man of experience to really understand what makes a woman like my wife tick.' He winked knowingly. Ramon, horror-struck lest the mayor in his strange mood were about to divulge any more intimate details of married life, stood motionless in the middle of the room for a second, then suddenly recalled what had brought him there.

‘There's a rabble in the plaza, señor,' he said.

‘There's always a rabble in the plaza, Ramon,' the mayor replied. ‘What do you expect from this bloody town?'

‘No, there's trouble brewing,' Ramon whispered. ‘Don Bosco's gone missing.'

‘Missing? How can he go missing?'

‘He's gone. Just like that. People are saying he may have been eaten in the middle of the night.'

‘Good. Bloody annoying little barber,' the mayor replied.

‘But I need a haircut,' Ramon said pitifully. Seeing the look on his assistant's face, the mayor began to take in what he was being told.

‘Well, where is he? A man like that can't just go missing. Not at his age.'

‘He has. The shop is locked. It's been locked since last night and
nobody knows where he is. They are demanding that you come down and do something about it.'

‘What can I do?'

‘I don't know. Address the crowd. Reassure them that he will come back. Organise a search party. Find him.'

‘I'll tell you what I'm going to do,' the mayor said briskly. ‘I'm going to get that bloody shop back.'

As the crowd began to amass in the plaza, a storm was brewing in the mayor's house. Doña Lucia, who had been given notice to leave after breakfast, had broken down completely, confessing that over the years she had been engaged in a battle to fight off the mayor's advances and preserve the integrity of her sister's marriage. There was something in the tone of Lucia's voice that troubled Gloria, making her doubt her judgement. But when Lucia ingeniously managed to find conclusive evidence of the mayor's recent misdemeanours, Gloria could cope no longer with the humiliation of the apparent deception. A hurriedly scrawled love letter to an unnamed mistress and an extraordinary item of women's underwear were revealed to her, the latter having been bought by Lucia many years ago and never having found a use, until now.

‘He has deceived us both,' Lucia said, melodramatically.

Gloria stood in the middle of the dining room holding the offending items in her hand.

‘What am I to do? What am I to do?' she said, over and over again to herself, lamenting the tatters of her marriage.